Cry, the beloved two-state solution: Israeli Jew challenges legitimacy of Israel

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In my opinion, more Israeli Jews are rethinking the legitimacy of the
existence of Israel than ever before in my lifetime -- in this case,
even denying implicitly the "Jewish right to self-determination in
Palestine" to which the very radical Matzpen was devoted in the late
1960s. That, in my opinion, is because the question of the
continuation of Israel's existence is posed more sharply than ever
before.  Even the suicide bombings -- with all their obvious
weaknesses as a strategic method of struggle -- have not, as is
usually claimed, solidified the Israeli population against the
Palestinians, but have also contributed to forcing Israeli Jews to
think as well as react.  (Of course, in the first stages of the
process, not only class and political forces but the inevitable and
organic conservatism of human thought works in favor of Sharon and the
like initially when such big questions are posed.

This initial rethinking among Israelis inevitably finds its reflection
among Jews in the United States, despite the radically more
unfavorable class composition of the Jewish community in the United
States as compared to Israel.  That is why I think it is correct for
the United for Peace and Justice -- sorry about using the UFPJ acronym
in a previous mailing -- and for others involved in building the
October 25 demonstration to bend the stick toward providing more space
for dissidents in the Jewish community to express themselves, without
UFPJ or others making any concessions in principle.

In that sense, I think it is correct to strive to keep, for example,
Tikkun and Michael Lerner in the coalition despite the fact that
Michael Lerner  (who should be viewed as a politician first and a
rabbi second in my opinion) may be preparing the way for a dramatic
break with the "anti-Semite" antiwar activists as he has done in the
past. I firmly disagree with Lenni Brenner's thoroughly sectarian
advice that we don't need "ranting rabbis" in the antiwar and
Palestinian struggles. In the end, this kind of reaching out will
redound to the benefit of the antiwar struggle and the Palestinian
struggle.
Fred Feldman

Ha'aretz   August 7, 2003

Cry, the beloved two-state solution

By Ari Shavit

As negotiations with the Palestinians lurch forward and the separation
wall snakes its way through the West Bank, two veteran leftists have
reached a startling conclusion: There cannot be two states for two
peoples in this land.

1. The groundwater

Meron Benvenisti and Haim Hanegbi did not exchange views. Benvenisti
lives in Jerusalem, on the edge of the desert, and is trying to write
a last book, a summing up. Hanegbi lives in Ramat Aviv, not far from
the sea, and is trying to formulate a last, definitive, manifesto. Yet
this summer both Benvenisti      and Hanegbi reached an intriguing point
in their conceptual development. They both reached the conclusion that
there is no longer any prospect of ending the conflict by means of a
two-state solution. Each of them separately has come to believe that
the time has come to establish one state between the Jordan River and
the Mediterranean Sea: a binational state.

On the face of it, they come from utterly different worlds.
Benvenisti's roots lie deep in the old Zionist establishment. He was
the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek's right-hand man, a
candidate of Ratz (the predecessor of Meretz) for the Knesset.
Hanegbi, in contrast, is a retired revolutionary. He was a central
activist in the radical-left Matzpen group, one of the founders of the
Progressive List, a partner in the leadership of the peace movement
Gush Shalom. However, Benvenisti and Hanegbi also share a deep common
background. Both are from Jerusalem and are graduates of the city's
Beit Hakerem high school, both are Ashkenazi-Sephardi whose ideas were
shaped in the latter stages of the British Mandate period. And both of
them love this land and love human beings. Both are surging rivers of
emotions and stories and sheer human vitality.

It's precisely because they are not cut of the same cloth, because
they are not from the same ideological circle, that the parallel,
albeit not identical, processes they are undergoing are so
fascinating. True, they are both end-figures, lone wolves, sensitive
sentimentalists who are sometimes perceived as eccentrics.
Nevertheless, each is an original thinker with finely tuned senses.
Both have a knee-jerk aversion to falsity, whitewashing, and uniform
thought. So perhaps the fact that the two of them arrived during the
past year at the conceptual place they now occupy is of some
significance. Possibly it says something about the groundwater of the
current Israeli reality.

2. Haim Hanegbi

Where did it start? Right after the start of the intifada. Already
then I told [veteran peace activist] Uri Avnery that I was regressing,
I was returning to my origins, that it might be time to reconsider the
dream of a shared state. But Avnery laughed - that's his way. He said
I was dreaming. Avnery has done a lot in the battle for peace and the
battle against the occupation, but Avnery also has a defect. He has no
psychic mechanism. Just as [pioneer Zionist activist Joseph]
Trumpeldor had only one arm, Avnery is incapable of relating to
people. It's not something evil, it's not indifference, it's a
disability. He simply lacks that emotional organ. So he laughed at me
with a kind of patronizing disdain and ignored what I said. I didn't
respond.

For the next three years we continued to formulate the Friday messages
of Gush Shalom. But at the beginning of the summer I decided I could
no longer remain silent, that I had to come out with it. So I wrote a
text against the occupation at the end of which I included, for the
first time, the idea of one state for the two nations. A state in
partnership, a binational state.

Avnery went wild. He was furious. He said I was harming the
Palestinian cause and endangering the Palestinian state and serving
the right wing. That I was reinforcing fears of the "phased theory."
When I insisted that the text be sent to all the members of Gush
Shalom, I was told that it would not be disseminated because it was
contrary to the Gush Shalom consensus. I said, fine, if that's how it
is I'm leaving Gush Shalom. So with one phone call, I left Gush
Shalom. Others also left in my wake. Half of the hardcore left, so now
I am working with a few good people on disseminating my old-new idea
about the renewal of binational thinking.

As I wrote in my document, it is plain to me today that there is no
other alternative to ending the conflict. Everyone with eyes to see
and ears to hear has to understand that only a binational partnership
can save us. That is the only way to transform ourselves from being
strangers in our land into native sons.

The truth is that it all started long ago, in the Mekor Baruch
neighborhood of Jerusalem. When I was 10, at the end of the Mandate
period, our landlord was an Arab named Jamil. The word "Alhambra" was
chiseled in stone on the house in Arabic and English. And the house
next door was not only owned by Arabs, it was also inhabited by Arabs.
The whole neighborhood from our house west was mixed. And at my dad's
place of work, the Jerusalem municipality, Jews and Arabs worked
together, too. My dad took me on outings in and around Jerusalem. I
remember Palestinian Ein Karem very well, and Malha and Lifta and Beit
Mazmil. So the Arabs were never strangers to me. They were always part
of my landscape. Part of the country. And I never doubted the
possibility of living with them: house next to house, street next to
street.


At the end of 1947 they disappeared. It was in the winter, in the
middle of eighth grade. And the strange thing is that it wasn't in the
least traumatic. It was all done quietly, without any dramatics. They
just sort of evaporated. I'm not even sure I saw them packing. I'm not
really sure I saw them collecting their things and melting away down
the slope behind Schneller Camp. But I remember Deir Yassin well. I
remember that we were in our classroom in the Beit Hakarem high school
when we saw the smoke rising from Deir Yassin [an Arab village on the
western edge of Jerusalem where a massacre was perpetrated in 1948].

So, in the 1960s, when we talked about the principle of equality in
Matzpen, I wasn't just thinking in terms of socialism or a universal
concept. With me it was baladi, my country, the scents and memories of
my childhood. Then came obsessive collecting of Mandate period maps to
locate the villages that had been erased, the life that ceased to be.
And the feeling that without them this is a barren country, a disabled
country, a country that caused an entire nation to disappear.

So it wasn't easy for me to adopt the two-state solution, in the
1980s. It was a tough inner struggle. And I never, ever, joined the
Zionist left. I never abandoned revolutionary thinking. But when I saw
that Peace Now existed and that there was some sort of movement in the
streets I didn't think it was right to stay cooped up with dogmas. I
thought the two-state idea was a worthy one.

When Oslo came, I thought it was really something great. I read the
accords thoroughly, under a magnifying glass, and I reached the
conclusion that there really was mutual recognition, that the
possibility existed of closing the conflict file. So in the mid-1990s
I had second thoughts about my traditional approach. I didn't think it
was my task to go to Ramallah and present the Palestinians with the
list of Zionist wrongs and tell them not to forget what our fathers
did to their fathers. I believed in the dynamics of Oslo. I also
believed in [Yitzhak] Rabin. After the assassination I even joined the
Labor Party.

In the past couple of years I realized that I made a mistake; that,
like the Palestinians, I too was taken in. I took Israeli talk
seriously and didn't pay attention to Israeli deeds. When I realized,
one day, that the settlements had doubled themselves, I also realized
that Israel had missed its one hour of grace, had rejected the rare
opportunity it was given. Then I understood that Israel could not free
itself of its expansionist pattern. It is bound hand and foot to its
constituent ideology and to its constituent act, which was an act of
dispossession.

I realized that the reason it is so tremendously difficult for Israel
to dismantle settlements is that any recognition that the settlements
in the West Bank exist on plundered Palestinian land will also cast a
threatening shadow over the Jezreel Valley, and over the moral status
of Beit Alfa and Ein Harod. I understood that a very deep pattern was
at work here. That there is one historical continuum that runs from
Kibbutz Beit Hashita to the illegal settler outposts; from Moshav
Nahalal to the Gush Katif settlements in the Gaza Strip. And that
continuity apparently cannot be broken. It's a continuity that takes
us back to the very beginning, to the incipient moment.

I am now reading a book by Eliezer Be'eri about the beginning of the
conflict and the start of the Zionist enterprise. At one point, he
describes how, on November 3, 1878, as Yehuda Raab tilled the first
furrow in the soil of Petah Tikva, he felt that "he is the first
person to hold a Jewish plow on the soil of the prophets after the
long years of exile." But look what it says here: "Arabs also joined
Yehuda Raab on the big day when plowing began. He himself, with his
plow harnessed to animals, could not have tilled an area of hundreds
of dunams. He was joined in the plowing by 12 Arab fellahin."

What does that mean, Ari? You tell me what it means. What it means is
that when Yehuda Raab came to till the first furrow after 2,000 years
of exile he didn't have the strength to do it alone. He needed
fellahin, and 12 of them came to help him. Reading that, I tell myself
that I know all about Raab and who his descendants were and I know how
his project developed. But I know absolutely nothing about the 12
fellahin. They appear in history as unknowns and disappear from
history the same way, with hardly a trace. They were removed from
history by Zionism. Who were they? Where did they go? Where are they
today?

So the aging revolutionary you see before you has taken a vow to find
those
12 vanished individuals, those 12 abductees of history. My life
mission is to set them free from their historical captivity and give
them names and faces and rights. Because their whole sin in relation
to Raab was that they lived in this country untold generations before
him. Why should they be punished for that? Why insist on their
oblivion?

I don't think this is some private madness. On the contrary: I think
it is an attempt to be released from madness. I am not a psychologist,
but I think that everyone who lives with the contradictions of Zionism
condemns himself to protracted madness. It's impossible to live like
this. It's impossible to live with such a tremendous wrong. It's
impossible to live with such conflicting moral criteria. When I see
not only the settlements and the occupation and the suppression, but
now also the insane wall that the Israelis are trying to hide behind,
I have to conclude that there is something very deep here in our
attitude to the indigenous people of this land that drives us out of
our minds.

There is something gigantic here that doesn't allow us truly to
recognize the Palestinians, that doesn't allow us to make peace with
them. And that something has to do with the fact that even before the
return of the land and the houses and the money, the settlers' first
act of expiation toward the natives of this land must be to restore to
them their dignity, their memory, their justness.

But that is just what we are incapable of doing. Our past won't allow
us to do it. Our past forces us to believe in the project of a Jewish
nation-state that is a hopeless cause. Our past prevents us from
seeing that the whole story of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of
Israel is over. Because if you want Jewish sovereignty you must have a
border, but as [Zionist thinker and activist Yitzhak] Tabenkin said,
this country cannot tolerate a border in its midst. If you want Jewish
sovereignty you need a fortified, separatist uni-national structure,
but that is contrary to the spirit of the age. Even if Israel
surrounds itself with a fence and a moat and a wall, it won't help.
Because your fears are well-placed, Ari: Israel as a Jewish state can
no longer exist here. In the long term, Israel as a Jewish state will
not be able to exist.

I'm not crazy. I don't think that it will be possible to enlist
thousands of people in the cause of a binational state tomorrow
morning. But when I consider that Meron Benvenisti was right in saying
that the occupation has become irreversible, and when I see where the
madness of sovereignty is leading good Israelis, I raise my own little
banner again. I do so without illusions. I am not part of any army. I
am not the leader of any army. In the meantime our act is that of a
few people. But I think it's important to place this idea on the table
now.

In essence, the binational principle is the deepest antithesis of the
wall. The purpose of the wall is to separate, to isolate, to imprison
the Palestinians in pens. But the wall imprisons the Israelis, too. It
turns Israel into a ghetto. The wall is the great despairing solution
of the Jewish-Zionist society. It is the last desperate act of those
who cannot confront the Palestinian issue. Of those who are compelled
to push the Palestinian issue out of their lives and out of their
consciousness. In the face of that I say the opposite.

I say that we were apparently too forgiving toward Zionism; that the
Jews who came here and found a land that wasn't empty adopted a
pattern of unrestrained force. Instead of the conflict foisting moral
order and reason on them, it addicted them to the use of force. But
that force has played itself out, it has reached its limits. If Israel
remains a colonialist state in its character, it will not survive. In
the end the region will be stronger than Israel, in the end the
indigenous people will be stronger than Israel. Those who hope to live
by the sword will die by the sword. That is perfectly clear, Ari: they
will die by the sword.

Don't treat me as a stranger, as an outsider. True, it's easier for
me, because I'm from Hebron and Jerusalem, from the Old Yishuv. It's
easier for me because I never took part in the killing and the
dispossession and the occupation. All the same, I feel a commitment
toward the society I live in. And precisely because of that, I believe
that anyone who wants to ensure the existence of a Jewish community in
this country has to free himself from the Zionist pattern, has to open
gates. Because as things are now, there is no chance. A Jewish
nation-state will not take hold here.

It's totally clear that it can't be done without recognition in
principle of the right of return, because this is a case in which a
nation was condemned to exile from its land, not because there was no
room, but because it was supplanted by others. That injustice has not
been erased for 55 years and it won't be erased in another 55 years.
But that doesn't mean they will return to Jamusin, which is in the
middle of Tel Aviv. It doesn't mean they will settle at the corner of
Arlosoroff and Ibn Gvirol.

What it means is that the borders have to be open to them, as in
Europe. It means the establishment of a super-modern city in Galilee
for the 200,000 or 300,000 refugees in Lebanon. It means the
establishment of another Palestinian-Jewish city between Hebron and
Gaza that will both make the desert bloom and connect the two parts of
Palestine.

In general, we have to shift to a binational mode of thinking. Maybe
in the end we have to create a new, binational Israel, just as a new,
multiracial South Africa was created.

There will be no other choice, anyway. The attempt to achieve Jewish
sovereignty that is fenced in and insular has to be abandoned. We will
have to come to terms with the fact that we will live here as a
minority: a Jewish minority that will no longer be squeezed between
Hadera and Gedera, but will be able to settle in Nablus and Baghdad
and Damascus, too - and take part in the democratization of the Middle
East. That will be able to live and die here, to establish mixed
cities and mixed neighborhoods and mixed families.

But for that to happen, the mad dream of sovereignty will have to be
given up, Ari. We have to forgo that mad dream, which has caused so
much bloodshed here, has inflicted so many disasters, has generated a
hundred years of conflict.




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